17 May 2012

How To Install Mac OS X Lion Theme On Lubuntu / LXDE

Lubuntu 12.04 with Mac OS X Lion Theme, xcompmgr & cairo-dock

[click to enlarge]

Mac OS
X is the special one in the Desktop market. So many people admire it
because of its beauty, safety (yes, it is an UNIX) and its
profesional image as “an OS for profesional modern art designer”.
Yeah, Mac OS X has beautiful look and I do like its look-n-feel. And
so, there are so many theme patcher to make our Microsoft Windows or
Linux OS become Mac OS X in the appearance.

In
Linux Desktop, there are some project specialized in designing theme
transformation pack to make our Linux desktop to be looked like Mac
OS X. The most popular project probably is Mac4Lin. But, all of those
projects was designed only for GNOME or sometimes support XFCE and
how about LXDE? Our Star in the current lightweight Linux desktop?
(Yes, LXDE is the most light-but-complete Linux desktop for now).

Until
now, there is no project that officially support LXDE. Basically,
LXDE uses gtk (now still stay with gtk2) and any gtk theme can be
used in LXDE. The problem is, LXDE uses openbox as its window
manager. And as the logical reason for its ligthweight, openbox has
limitation. Openbox doesn't support complex theming by using high
resolution png images so we couldn't build sophisticated theme for
openbox. However, we could still build window theme with color for
openbox and we could try to resemble any theme we want, although it
will never be pitch-perfect same as a clone. And so, there is an
openbox theme tried to resemble Mac OS X theme and we could use it to
transform our LXDE desktop to be looked like Mac OS X Lion.

After
experimenting with previous Mac4Lin theme, I've successfully
transform my Lubuntu 12.04 to be Mac OS X Lion style and so then I
pack them into DEBS and we could transform our Lubuntu to be looked
like Mac OS X easily. Here are the steps to transform Lubuntu to be
looked like Mac OS X Lion :

Check
the Strecth option of Spacer Applet between Menu Applet and system
applet in order to get wide space between Menu and System Tray
Applet.

Change
the gtk and icon theme into Mac OS X, and change the Lubuntu logo
into Apple logo by right clik at the Menu applet and point the image
logo to /usr/share/icons/Mac-Lion-Icons/places/24/start-here.png

Add
Cairo Dock and xcompmgr as additional autostarted startup
applications in LXDE by editing this :

Hey all. i have a problem with this. the background is light, and the text of things are also white so it is quite hard to see what is written, for example in the Calculator. how to fix this? i am happy for help!//paul